- I wonder to what degree the assumption of socially constructed gender is really an excuse for submissive gay men, to play the female role - without experiencing the psychological implications of submission? — counterpunch

Have you had problems with this kind of thing?

The concepts of masculine and feminine, as well as our attitudes about transgenderism and homosexuality, are largely shaped by our culture. I'm not sure if I need to argue the point. Do I, or can you accept this?
— praxis

I don't accept this... why do you think that? — counterpunch

I think there's some biological basis for gender, just as I think there may be a biological basis for liberalism vs conservativism. Liberals are believed to be naturally more open to new experiences and that's could be the biological basis for being generally progressive rather than conservative. Nevertheless, it's obvious that culture plays a large role in how these propencities may develop. No one is born knowing gender role norms, for example.

Whatever the case, on further reading of the topic I see that you brought up the issue of gender politics as "an example of how facts are disposable to the left" and therefore not distinguishable from what I'll call Trumpism. I can only assume that you either fail to appreciate the difference between institutional facts and empirical facts, or that you're deliberately presenting a weak argument in order to mislead. We don't need to look any further than the number of votes that Trump received in the 2020 election and the number of objectively false statements that he's made over his term in office to get a good indication of how much the American right values truth, and compare those numbers to left-wing administrations.

Interesting that you import sexuality into this discussion. I didn't raise it, but now you have - I wonder to what degree the assumption of socially constructed gender is really an excuse for submissive gay men, to play the female role - without experiencing the psychological implications of submission? — counterpunch

I've read this several times and can't make sense out it. Can you rephrase the question?

No. I'm heterosexual. My curiosity is purely intellectual!

This might help you understand how gender roles vary by culture.

I think there's some biological basis for gender, just as I think there may be a biological basis for liberalism vs conservativism. Liberals are believed to be naturally more open to new experiences and that's could be the biological basis for being generally progressive rather than conservative. Nevertheless, it's obvious that culture plays a large role in how these propensities may develop. No one is born knowing gender role norms, for example. — praxis

Right so, if you say:

culture plays a large role in how these propensities may develop. — praxis

...what do you think the effect is of undermining gender norms by teaching primary school children there are 99 genders, and taking drag queens into schools, and school trips to gay pride - and so forth? The feminisation of men! Which is exactly what the right are complaining about. When I was a kid, boys were boys. We fought, played football and climbed trees. No-one was imposing gender stereotypes on us. We wanted to do those things. I didn't have any skin on my knees until I was 14. Girls didn't want to do those things. Boys did those things because we were allowed to be boys!

Whatever the case, on further reading of the topic I see that you brought up the issue of gender politics as "an example of how facts are disposable to the left" and therefore not distinguishable from what I'll call Trumpism. — praxis

And in doing so, you'd seek to dismiss the validity of the argument. But I'm not Trump. I'm not an American. I'm British, and as a straight white working class man - I find that suddenly I'm at the back of your politically correct queue, and that the queue is getting longer from the middle as supposed victims are getting put in line ahead of me, purely on the basis of their arbitrary characteristics. It's bait and switch. I was fine with don't discriminate on the basis of arbitrary characteristics. That's fair, but now it's positive discrimination on the basis of skin colour, sexuality, gender - and that creates perverse social incentives: i.e. the feminisation of men!

I can only assume that you either fail to appreciate the difference between institutional facts and empirical facts, or that you're deliberately presenting a weak argument in order to mislead. We don't need to look any further than the number of votes that Trump received in the 2020 election and the number of objectively false statements that he's made over his term in office to get a good indication of how much the American right values truth, and compare those numbers to left-wing administrations. — praxis

Of course you think that I don't understand, or am dishonest. How else could I possibly disagree with the politically correct dogma if there weren't something wrong with me? You say my arguments are weak?! You've used an appeal to the worst example, and now an ad hominem attack upon the clarity or honesty of my thought. That's weak.

I've read this several times and can't make sense out it. Can you rephrase the question? — praxis

No. Consider it rhetorical. I'm not that interested!

This might help you understand how gender roles vary by culture. — frank

I don't think it does, partly because it's nothing I didn't already know, secondly because it's hunter-gatherer tribal culture, and lastly because I'm talking about my culture, which is under attack by an enemy within. Reds under the bed! A fifth column of post modernist, neo-Marxist political correctness bigots and bullies - hacking away at the very foundations of Western civilisation.

Interesting that you import sexuality into this discussion. I didn't raise it, but now you have - I wonder to what degree the assumption of socially constructed gender is really an excuse for submissive gay men, to play the female role - without experiencing the psychological implications of submission? — counterpunch

One of the cheats in the gender discussion is the construction "gender assigned at birth". 999 times out of a 1000 gender is identified by glancing at the external genitals. The number of situations where sex organs are so ambiguous that a doctor would need to arbitrarily "assign" a sex is very small. Use of the verb "assigned" is a clever way of asserting that gender is arbitrary.

There is some validity to your observation. It could be extended to say "socially constructed gender" is a justification for men and women whose sexual orientation falls in the middle of the Kinsey scale to experiment with cross dressing, cross-role playing, changing pronouns, etc. Some males (no idea how many) may just find the female gender role more attractive (whether or not they are gay). (Sexual orientation is different than gender confusion.)

I presume you are using "female role" and "submission" in the sexual sense.

The problem I have with that part of your observation is that a large share of gay men perform both roles in the same encounter with equal competence and satisfaction. Maybe once upon a past--pre gay lib--time men thought in terms of female roles and submission (pitcher/catcher, active/passive, dominant/submissive). Certainly the old psychiatric literature (pre 1972) used that terminology.

At least from my (fairly extensive) experience most gay men are actively involved in sexual encounters--period. Maybe in "rough trade sex" (sexual encounters with roughish, working class heterosexual men) the old terminology would still be relevant -- but even then, gay men who like rough trade pursue it. (Full disclosure: my few encounters with rough trade didn't end well.)

There are some specialty areas, like bondage and discipline which involve pretty much exclusive master/slave, top/bottom roles--and this would be true in heterosexual B&D. Or so I gather, anyway. I find the B&D/S&M scene sort of interesting, the same way I find fascist gangs interesting.

Reds under the bed! — counterpunch

As you know, politics make for odd under-the-bed fellows. The vaguely defined left and right share some similar cognitive defects. The arbitrary gender people and the anti-evolution or intelligent design (sic) people kind of think the same way.

One of the cheats in the gender discussion is the construction "gender assigned at birth". 999 times out of a 1000 gender is identified by glancing at the external genitals. The number of situations where sex organs are so ambiguous that a doctor would need to arbitrarily "assign" a sex is very small. Use of the verb "assigned" is a clever way of asserting that gender is arbitrary.

There is some validity to your observation. It could be extended to say "socially constructed gender" is a justification for men and women whose sexual orientation falls in the middle of the Kinsey scale to experiment with cross dressing, cross-role playing, changing pronouns, etc. Some males (no idea how many) may just find the female gender role more attractive (whether or not they are gay). (Sexual orientation is different than gender confusion.) — Bitter Crank

If by clever you mean dishonest, then yes, they're very clever! Did you read the case of David Reimer? Circumcision gone wrong; so they surgically turned him into a girl, and raised him as a girl in ignorance - and his maleness re-asserted itself in later life. Before then, however, the doctor involved had declared his genius, and the social constructionists ran with it. The idea gender is socially constructed remains the left wing, politically correct viewpoint, but the actual case upon which that assumption was built proved the exact opposite.

Interesting as the rest of your post is, I have nothing to contribute to the discussion.

Except maybe: "Oh! I see!"

What troubles me though, is the conflation of sexuality and gender - particularly in education.

"A BBC programme aimed at nine- to 12-year-olds includes the claim that there are 'over 100 gender identities'. The film, 'Identity – Understanding Sexual and Gender Identities', is being offered on the corporation's website as part of its relationships and sex education package."

The BBC are utterly consumed by political correctness; and they're piggy backing the idea of socially constructed gender, on the back of a spectrum of sexual orientation - and that comes far too close to grooming kids for my liking. I remember when the Labour Party were in bed with the paedophile information exchange (PIE) - and seeking to normalise paedophilia under the auspices of moral relativism. Now, they've got it so you can't dissent from this indoctrination - or it makes you a bigot.

I quote this line, but refer to all of your argument up to this point. You have misunderstood. Boys have tendencies toward physical spatial play - and girls toward social play. It's very well noted in the literature. These are not one-off experimental results. And it doesn't mean those behaviours are exclusive; but that there are distinct differences in patterns of play. Given a room full of toys, boys will instinctively go for the cars and footballs - whereas girls will go for the dolls. Piaget is not some left wing undergraduate psych student - he spent his life studying developmental psychology. Why impugn his professionalism? — counterpunch

I have not misunderstood. The point is that the given evidence of patterns does not fit with the conclusions about which trait belongs of which people in the given analysis.

A mass pattern is a mass pattern: it shows a rate of occurrence amongst a group. It does not show nature if an individual is only the a majority occurrence. Paiget has observation and grounds to claim a pattern of play in the observer mass group, that it is the cases that more girls played a certain way and boys another.

He does not have grounds to suggest social play is the specific “nature” a girls. Or that spacial play is the specific “nature” of boys. The empirical state of a given girl or boy is not a mass pattern. If we asking, “What is in the nature of a person with a given gender to do?” we are not measuring what behaviour are more common of a mass, we are asking about what it is a individual of a girl or boy might do. His own observations, the lack of exclusivity of behaviour, show the exact opposite of what you suggest they do: that girls and boys have a nature of engaging in spacial or social play respectively.

The argument you are making, suggesting that girl and boys only have a “nature” because more of them behave in some way, is outright lying about what occurs empirically. Some, even many, girls and boys have a nature which are the opposite of the pattern. Just because there aren’t as many of them doesn’t make them any less existing people with their own behaviours.

The problem isn’t that patterns of behaviours haven’t be observed, it’s that people are interpreting these to mean something they don’t and engaging in anti-scientific (as it is blind to the empirical reality of girls and boys who’s nature it is to break the pattern) account of the nature of girls and boys in the process.

That's just not correct; not least because it's not nature "vs" nurture. No-one with any education would see these as exclusive. It doesn't happen, and never has. It's always been that both nature and nurture influence development, but often one is more influential. Lefties want everything to be nurture - so they can subject it to their identity politics dogma. They construe gender as a social construction - but then, I think you should read the story of David Reimer. Dr Money's conclusions were premature to say the least - and yet still form the basis of left wing gender politics dogma. — counterpunch

You misunderstand. I was not suggesting any people were claiming development was only nature or only nature, my point was that each influence was both nature and nature. So there is no opposition of nature effects and nurture effects at all.

Take something considered a nature, like the influence of a gene. Nowadays we know that the gene does not act unilaterally. It occurs in a specific environment which did not induce it to some other effect. Now take something considered nurture, like humans learning one language or another. How do we learn a language? Our bodies have to react in certain way to the environment we encounter. Our biology makes it happen. The supposed “nurture” effect is only produced if one has a specific biological nature. It’s literally impossible for nature or nurture to be more influential because every instance is produced by a specific combination of itself and its environment.


The notion of a “blank slate” has been dead for decades. It’s also just about as far as you can get from the modern left accounts of gender identification as you can get. I’m very familiar with the David Remier case. It’s a seminal case for analysis of gender identification, innate sense of body and self.

It is very important because it shows the innate pull and effects of gender identification, and the dangers of community authors trying to enforce an identity and belonging which is not one’s own. Mr. Money’s attempt to enforce and alter David Remier’s sense of identity and belonging is akin to what your gender binary does to many trans people.

When encountering a trans person with dysphoria, the gender binary tries to insist (exactly like Money did to Remier), that their sense of identity and belonging of a body is false, and instead is really this other one (that Reimer was a girl, who was meant to have a certain body, in the case of Money. In the case of your gender binary, that a trans woman is actually just a man and is meant to belong with a man’s body). The left isn't concerned with, as Money was, attempting to give someone whatever identity or gender they want, irrespective what identity a person actually had. They are concerned with recognising what it innate to a given person, even when that violates exceptions of what their identity should or must be.

That is quite possibly the maddest paragraph ever written in the English language. Barring incredibly rare genetic abnormalities, a human being with a penis is a man. Not "categorized as a man." But as a matter of biological fact, the penis owner IS a man. Incredibly rare exceptions - such as hermaphrodites, do not invalidate the fact a human with a penis IS a man. That way madness lies - and that's precisely the intent of left wing, post modernist, neo marxist, political correctness bigots and bullies, regardless of the harm their crazy making causes. — counterpunch

It's clearly not a biological fact. Even you admit that to the biological state doesn't automatically make you a man-- if that were true, then various intersex people would be just men too, as they are human. Do you not see the outright contradiction this insistence?

When I say categorised as man, what I mean is there is a distinction between a biological state and having a given identity. The former is an existing organ, which might occur also sorts of places: someone might have chopped on off an have it sitting on their mantle (is this biological state of a penis a man?), perhaps someone has worked out how to grow now in a lab (is this biological state of a penis is a jar a man?), it might be an organ on a intersex person. So how come the biological state gets some exception when on these people you deem men, such that it's presence just means a man is there?

The point here is not people with biologies don't have identities. People with biological states of penis are men all the time. It's just that the identity of man isn't given by the presence of the biological state of a penis (as seen in all those expectations who pretend don't have relevance), but rather through the identity itself. There are men with penises, rather men being there because there is a penis.

The argument you are making, suggesting that girl and boys only have a “nature” because more of them behave in some way, is outright lying about what occurs empirically. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I don't lie. What would be the point? This has really snowballed from my comment that the left deny the biological fact of gender. Now we've got penises in jars sitting on the mantlepiece - the secret aim of every politically correct fifth wave feminist!

You misunderstand. I was not suggesting any people were claiming development was only nature or only nature, my point was that each influence was both nature and nature. So there is no opposition of nature effects and nurture effects at all. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Of course I do. How could I possibly understand and disagree at the same time? Oh, right - because it's not the left wing argument that gender has a basis in biology. They do not acknowledge that it's nature and nurture. They claim gender is socially constructed. But nice example of moving the gaol posts. Was that on purpose - or did you not realise you were doing it?

Anyhow, keep going, and now factor in how undermining gender roles in society influences childhood development, and then ask yourself - are people happier for not knowing what gender they are "supposed to be"? Suicide rates amongst trans people are significantly above the average!

don't think it does, partly because it's nothing I didn't already know, secondly because it's hunter-gatherer tribal culture, and lastly because I'm talking about my culture, which is under attack by an enemy within. Reds under the bed! A fifth column of post modernist, neo-Marxist political correctness bigots and bullies - hacking away at the very foundations of Western civilisation. — counterpunch

This is how you respond to a reasonable post. :roll:

This is how you respond to a reasoned response. — frank

It wasn't a reasoned argument. You didn't make a point - you gave me homework, posting a link without picking out what you think is relevant.

It wasn't a reasoned argument. You didn't make a point - you gave me homework, posting a link without picking out what you think is relevant. — counterpunch

You're like the new NOS, but less fun.

How so? Would NOS happily go pick out a branch to hang himself from - when you waved vaguely in the direction of a forest? If you're gonna make a point, make it your point!

Did you read the case of David Reimer? Circumcision gone wrong; so they surgically turned him into a girl, and raised him as a girl in ignorance - and his maleness re-asserted itself in later life. — counterpunch

I have known about Reimer's case for quite some time. It's pretty bad. According to Wikipedia: "Recent academic studies have criticized Money's work in many respects, particularly in regard to his involvement with the involuntary sex-reassignment of the child David Reimer,[3] his forcing this child and his brother to simulate sex acts which Money photographed[4] and the adult suicides of both brothers."

John Money (b. 1921, New Zealand, d. 2006, U.S.) was Reimer's psychologist. Money was at Johns Hopkins University from 1951 till retirement. He established the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic in 1965. Money was the co-editor of a 1969 book "Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment", which helped bring more acceptance to sexual reassignment surgery and transgender individuals.

Google can find several lists of possible genders, all bullshit. Here's 5 examples.

Novigender

A gender identity used by people who experience having a gender that can’t be described using existing language due to its complex and unique nature.

Polygender

This gender identity term describes the experience of having multiple gender identities, simultaneously or over time.

This term indicates the number of gender identities someone experiences, but doesn’t necessarily indicate which genders are included in the given person’s polygender identity.

Social dysphoria

A specific type of gender dysphoria that manifests as distress and discomfort that results from way society or other people perceive, label, refer to, or interact with someone’s gender or body.

Soft butch

Both a gender identity and term used to describe the nonconforming gender expression of someone who has some masculine or butch traits, but doesn’t fully fit the stereotypes associated with masculine or butch cisgender lesbians.

Stone butch

Both a gender identity and term used to describe the nonconforming gender expression of someone who embodies traits associated with female butchness or stereotypes associated with traditional masculinity.

Reimer's case is utterly tragic. But no less tragic, arguably, than confused kids - drinking in all this left wing gender politics propaganda, turning up at GIDS and getting fed puberty blockers by psychologists under politically correct pressure to 'affirm' their identity. Just recently, the UK High Court heard the case of Kiera Bell, and it's awaiting judgement.

In written submissions, Mr Hyam said: "That children are not capable of giving informed consent to undergo a type of medical intervention about which the evidence base is poor, the risks and potential side-effects are still largely unknown, and which is likely to set them on a path towards permanent and life-altering physical, psychological, emotional and developmental consequences... is the common-sense and obvious position."

But the social constructions don't care about people; they only care about the self righteous glow they feel when wagging their finger in someone's face! Someone's haunting androgynous face!

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/0D3D/production/_114798330_keira.png

... supposed victims are getting put in line ahead of me, purely on the basis of their arbitrary characteristics. — counterpunch

On the basis of their disadvantage, rather. Most don't want to give up their advantage, though fortunatly many do.

Of course you think that I don't understand, or am dishonest. How else could I possibly disagree with the politically correct dogma if there weren't something wrong with me? You say my arguments are weak?! You've used an appeal to the worst example, and now an ad hominem attack upon the clarity or honesty of my thought. That's weak. — counterpunch

Your "argument" is essentially that because liberals hold institutional beliefs they don't value truth any more that Trumpers. EVERYONE has institutional beliefs. Money, for example, is one of the most widely accepted social constructs. Just because someone agrees with a social construct says nothing about how much they value truth in general, reason, empirical facts, or science.

I've read this several times and can't make sense out it. Can you rephrase the question?
— praxis

No. Consider it rhetorical. I'm not that interested! — counterpunch

I pretty much assumed it was rhetorical nonsense.

On the basis of their disadvantage, rather. — praxis

Disadvantage someone is assumed to have, on the basis of their arbitrary characteristics. Reversing that, making those arbitrary characteristics an advantage through positive discrimination is not fair to the majority. It's discrimination against people like me - a white working class straight man with no 'ism' card to play, whose identity - allow me to assure you, confers no particular advantages, less yet privilege!

Your "argument" is essentially that because liberals hold institutional beliefs they don't value truth any more that Trumpers. — praxis

Is it? Thanks for telling me what my argument is. That's very helpful - for you. It's called reframing the argument - or setting up a strawman to knock down. Thing is, I've never used the phrase "institutional beliefs."

What I have sought to point out; Trump aside as a somewhat unique character, is that the right devalue scientific truth in the context of freedom - that seeks to accommodate the diversity of belief and opinion. The left devalue scientific truth to force their dogma on people.

On the basis of their disadvantage, rather.
— praxis

Disadvantage someone is assumed to have, on the basis of their arbitrary characteristics. Reversing that, making those arbitrary characteristics an advantage through positive discrimination is not fair to the majority. It's discrimination against people like me - a white working class straight man with no 'ism' card to play, whose identity - allow me to assure you, confers no particular advantages, less yet privilege! — counterpunch

I can’t speak for the UK but Jim Crow laws that were enforced up until only around 55 years ago institutionalized economic, educational, and social disadvantages for African Americans. Deeply engrained societal norms don’t change quickly, you may have noticed, especially when there is a strong conservative population that resists progressive reform.

Trump aside — counterpunch

Lol, yes, Trump is a rather inconvenient truth for the shit that you’re trying to sell so let’s put him aside.

I can’t speak for the UK but Jim Crow laws that were enforced up until only around 55 years ago institutionalized economic, educational, and social disadvantages for African Americans. Deeply engrained societal norms don’t change quickly, you may have noticed, especially when there is a strong conservative population that resists progressive reform. — praxis

I can't speak for the US, but it does seem they didn't handle ending slavery very well. If only the colonies had been returned to rightful rule of Her Majesty - all this could have been avoided! Still, now - it's not being handled very well by progressives either.

Lol, yes, Trump is a rather inconvenient truth for the shit that you’re trying to sell so let’s put him aside. — praxis

Not really. Trump's election was a demonstration of anger at the left - that wasn't simply discontent with equal rights. Trump's election tactics were a parody of left wing techniques - identity politics played for political advantage, divide and conquer, post truth deception, and so on. Trump gave the left a taste of their own medicine, and that was a departure for the right.

can't speak for the US, but it does seem they didn't handle ending slavery very well. If only the colonies had been returned to rightful rule of Her Majesty - all this could have been avoided! Still, now - it's not being handled very well by progressives either. — counterpunch

Possibly could have been avoided. Had the colonies been a British possession during and after the Industrial Revolution, and given British mills' very strong demand for American slave-cultivated and picked cotton, slavery might not have ended any sooner than it did. Machines to replace human labor in cotton growing weren't available until well after the period of the American Civil War.

It's quite possible that had Queen Victoria and Parliament ended slavery in... 1875, say, the British land-owning subjects living in the cotton growing colonies would have spawned black hatred of the sort that the descendants of British colonists spawned (manifested in Jim Crow laws.)

No, it's not being handled very well by progressives, middle of the roaders, or reactionaries. The most progressive administration--Roosevelt's,1932-1945--did very little to help black people. A solid argument can be made that it was the southern Democrats that prevented FDR from doing more, but it would have been surprising if a brahmin like Roosevelt had championed black people.

Slavery was ended by Britain in 1830. In 1833, Parliament passed the Factory Act, the provisions of which were:

No child under 9yrs was to work
Age certificates should be kept by employers
9-13yr olds were to work no more than 9hrs a day
13-18yr olds were to work no more than 12hrs a day
No children were to work at night
All children were to receive 2hrs of schooling a day
Factory inspectors would be used to enforce the law

So yeah, great demand for slave picked cotton in the mills. Huge!

True enough, Britain ended slavery before the US did. To what extent were the terms of the Factory Act honored in the breach, and how much in their observance? Nine hour days for 9-13 year olds; how many Humanitarian of the Year awards did parliament earn for that?

I'm aware that child labor was routine and customary pretty much everywhere for a long time. The US wasn't any different.

It's just that the identity of man isn't given by the presence of the biological state of a penis (as seen in all those expectations who pretend don't have relevance), but rather through the identity itself. — TheWillowOfDarkness

This is something that's too often skated over in these discussions. 'Man', 'male', 'he', and 'him' are just words, nothing more. The job they do is determined by the community of language users who maintain their meaning. Their use is not determined by some external authority, it's determined by us, the community using them.

The fact that, as you say, there exists only a spectrum of body-types, behaviours, feelings, even chromosomes is undeniable. The fact also that there exist patterns in these spectra (they do not evenly and homogeneously transform from one extreme to the other, but rather cluster in groups) is also undeniable.

Neither of these facts has the slightest thing to do with the choice of a language community to use words to loosely refer to any one of those clusters they can vaguely identify, and it is only these choices that are clashing.

There's not some god-given rule which states that the word 'man' can't be used to pick out a vague clustering of body-types and behaviours on those two spectra. The fact that body-type and behaviour are not discrete is irrelevant ('green' is not discrete either but blends seamlessly from yellow to blue, doesn't mean we can't have a word for it). The fact that the clusters of body-type and behaviour don't always align on their respective spectra is also irrelevant ('builder may refer to someone whose job it is to build or someone who is actually building - the two often, but not always coincide, the word causes no problems).

What the movement to change the way we use these words wants to do is just that. Change the clusters the words are used to pick out. Change them away from body-type, a bit more toward behaviour, and a lot more toward feelings. There's nothing wrong with that at all, the use of words is arbitrary and determined by the community using them. What is not right is the accompanying claim that the previous use was somehow wrong. There's nothing 'wrong' with a word picking out a loose clustering of properties along a spectrum - we do it all the time. There's nothing wrong with a word picking out a conjoined set of properties which do not always conjoin - again, we do this all the time.

There's one, and only one, relevant argument here. The terms we use (picking out the clusters and coincidences they do) leave some people feeling upset because, not falling into one of those clusters and coincidences, they feel the use of those terms somehow misrepresents them, and that's potentially a deeply unpleasant experience. Surely we have not become so monstrous as a society that something's being a deeply unpleasant experience for many is now insufficient an argument to change that thing? This move to tie oneself up in knots to make the other side somehow logically wrong (instead of just morally wrong) is making the problem worse and just builds bigger walls between opposing groups.

I don't think the Factory Act was widely honoured. There were only four factory inspectors for the whole country; and many of the factories would pay their workers in truck - tokens that could only be redeemed at the company store. See the Truck Acts 1831 - 1910.

It's easy now, to project modern moral sensibilities onto the past and identity slavery as a moral horror - but moral horror was the order of the day. If you can differentiate between slavery, and having to send your nine year old out to do a 9 hour day in a dangerous factory - to keep body and soul together, you have a finer tuned moral sensibility than I.

My grandfather was born in 1910 - failed his 11-plus exam, and was taken out of school and put to work in a coal mine. He was conscripted to fight in World War II, survived that - and died in 1990, in a rented house with barely enough in the bank to cover his funeral.

White privilege!

Trump's election tactics were a parody of left wing techniques - identity politics played for political advantage, divide and conquer, post truth deception, and so on. Trump gave the left a taste of their own medicine, and that was a departure for the right. — counterpunch

Deception isn’t a departure or novelty in American politics. Trump took it to new extremes though, and his supporters drank the kool-aid with cultish devotion.

I saw 'All the President's Men' recently, about Nixon and Watergate, and it was apparent, as the reporters - Bernstein and Woodward, drilled toward the truth, that there was a universal expectation that putting the truth in the public domain would matter. And it did. Nixon was forced to resign. Such naivety seemed incredibly poignant to me in contrast with the post modern day post-truth era; wherein the message is everything.

Well that's left wing philosophy - and it's like with Trump, the right have woken up to the game being played against them. I'll give you a for instance. In 2012, Obama shut down the collection of data on Arrest Related Death by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In 2013 Black Lies Matter was formed. Just before the 2020 election, BLM kicked off - and I wanted to know what the truth of the matter was, so I looked up the stats.

There are around 10 million arrests per year - as an average of data from 2003-2012. There are around 1000 Arrest Related Deaths. That's 0.01% of arrests result in death. Of those, 32% were black. So that's one third of 0.01% of arrests results in the death of a black person. 320 people per year, in a country of 320 million. It's literally one in a million. So, here's my question. If this terrible loss of life was of such concern that forming BLM was necessary - why did Obama shut down data collection?

In the Nixon era - it might have raised some eyebrows. In an era in which truth mattered, the disparity between the statistics and the social media generated narrative; a false narrative that incited riots and looting causing hundreds of millions in property damage, and spiking a Presidential election - that might have been something Woodward and Bernstein would have dug into, and dug and dug - in the expectation that truth would matter. Instead, BLM got a Nobel fucking prize!

In 2012, Obama shut down the collection of data on Arrest Related Death by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. — counterpunch

According to BJS ARD data collection was suspended in 2014 because of challenges related to under-reporting and the program was redesigned and data collection resumed in 2015. That’s what I found with a quick search anyway. If this is inaccurate perhaps you could provide links or other verification of your claims.

the disparity between the statistics and the social media generated narrative — counterpunch

What’s the disparity?

BLM got a Nobel fucking prize! — counterpunch

They were nominated, though they did just win Sweden's Olof Palme human rights prize for 2020 for promoting "peaceful civil disobedience against police brutality and racial violence" around the world.

According to BJS ARD data collection was suspended in 2014 because of challenges related to under-reporting and the program was redesigned and data collection resumed in 2015. That’s what I found with a quick search anyway. If this is inaccurate perhaps you could provide links or other verification of your claims. — praxis

No. Data collection was shut down the year before BLM were formed. Not the year after. They were formed in 2013. Shockingly, I don't keep a record of everything I've read, in case I need to provide a link later - but you've just been there. You could produce the link from your browser history - if you would contradict me.

What’s the disparity? — praxis

The disparity is between the statistics, and the idea fostered by BLM through social media, that there's a racist killing spree being conducted by the police. It's just not true!

They were nominated, though they did just win Sweden's Olof Palme human rights prize for 2020 for promoting "peaceful civil disobedience against police brutality and racial violence" around the world. — praxis

Okay, nominated for a Nobel peace prize for inciting riots with lies and burning and looting businesses, killing and assaulting people and attacking police!

In a post truth era - faced with the impossibility of reason, people can only pick a side, and stick to it no matter what!